KDO je nezbytná otevřená databáze COVID-19

Regarding vaccination of younger people

The situation is rather confused. An analysis of US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that children can be infected from COVID-19, get sick, and spread the virus to others. The vaccine most used until now in Europe, AstraZeneca, has been approved for people aged 18 years and older, originally not recommended for older people, now, where it is allowed, is used for patients of an age, as different as above 30 years in one country and above 55 or 60 in others. US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized Pfizer’s application for youngsters older than 16 years. Tests for younger children are in progress. Pfizer begun testing children above 12 years, and AstraZeneca for children older than six months. This issue is relevant in connection with that of on-presence school teaching. Students are a significant section of the population, but still their vaccination needs to wait the results of these assessments by vaccine producers, and the arguments supporting the opening of the school and universities seem to be more ideological than scientific.

Concerning the duration of the immunity after vaccination

This problem, analogous to that of immunity by infection, is basic in order to estimate how and when this pandemic will be over. However, there are not definite results. According to CDC, people have to be vaccinated regardless of having been or not infected in the past, because the immunity duration after recovery from COVID-19 is uncertain. It might be one year or two years. Neither is clear the duration of the protection period after vaccination, so that some vaccine producers are studying a third dose as a booster dose.

Interference between the use of some medicines and COVID-19 vaccines

It is known from clinical observations show vaccination may affect the metabolism of some medicine. However, the knowledge and understanding of these interactions in the COVID-19 case is still poor.

Adverse cases

The almost 900 million vaccinations performed till now have been accompanied by some adverse cases that had not been observed during the testing. It is surprising that this has been considered surprising, since the test samples were several orders of magnitude smaller than the vaccinated sample. However, these cases prompted a number of decisions about pausing or stopping the use of some vaccines, in particular AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson. Their rationale, when taken by a specialized agency like CDC, has been the need for further investigation, whereas, when taken by Governments, seems to reflect unscientific reaction of the population and its refusal of a given vaccine. As a matter of fact, with the exception of CDC for the Johnson and Johnson cases, specialized Health and Medicine agencies have unanimously stressed that the rate of the observed adverse cases is orders of magnitude lower than the risk of death by COVID-19 infection, without mentioning the deaths caused by extreme poverty that in 2020 increased by 68 million, worldwide, a figure that will increase, unless COVID-19 pandemic ends. It is hard to find a statistically based scientific justification for these decisions. A former director of the European Medicine Agency commented: “It seems to me that the Western world has lost some measure of the relationship between risk and benefit. There’s a plane crashing and one wonders if the parachute has a hole in it”. Moreover, for what concerns Johnson & Johnson, a recent declaration of Fauci seems to indicate that, given the rarity of the cases, the decision will be revised.

From this discussion, it is clear that the potentially enormous information about this matter is not fully used as it would be necessary and possible. If it were broadly available and accessible for analysis, at least by the academic community, this would make possible to increase the understanding of these problems and reduce the doubts about possible risks associated to the vaccination. Currently, this does not happen. IT/AI experts and model developers cannot easily access medical data, and medical analysis are usually limited to the few hospital data of direct knowledge of the researcher or at most to those available at national level.

It could be worth (and we would dare to say needed) creating a data bank of COVID-19in order to make the best and full use of the increasing information about this matter.

Co-author: Behrouz Pirouz

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